http://www.ciw-online.org/101.htmlThe Coalition of Immokalee Workers
The Campaign for Fair Food
In 2001, we launched the Campaign for Fair Food with the first-ever farmworker boycott of a major fast-food company. The national boycott of Taco Bell called on the fast-food giant to take responsibility for human rights abuses in the fields where its produce is grown and picked.
The logic behind the Campaign for Fair Food is simple. Major corporate buyers -- companies such as Publix, Ahold, Kroger and Wal-Mart -- purchase a tremendous volume of fruits and vegetables, leveraging their buying power to demand the lowest possible prices from their suppliers. This, in turn, exerts a powerful downward pressure on wages and working conditions in these suppliers' operations.
A 2004 study released by Oxfam America, "Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture," concludes: "Squeezed by the buyers of their produce, growers pass on the costs and risks imposed on them to those on the lowest rung of the supply chain: the farmworkers they employ" (36). The Campaign for Fair Food aims to reverse this trend by harnessing the purchasing power of the food industry for the betterment of farmworker wages and working conditions.
In March 2005, following a four-year campaign, Taco Bell agreed to meet all of our demands. This victory established several crucial precedents for farm labor reform, including:
* The first-ever direct, ongoing payment by a fast-food industry leader to farmworkers in its supply chain to address sub-standard farm labor wages (nearly doubling the percentage of the final retail price that goes to the workers who pick the produce);
* The first-ever enforceable Code of Conduct for agricultural suppliers in the fast-food industry (which includes the CIW, a worker-based organization, as part of the investigative body for monitoring worker complaints);
* Market incentives for agricultural suppliers willing to respect their workers’ human rights, even when those rights are not guaranteed by law;
* 100% transparency for Taco Bell’s tomato purchases in Florida.